The way you approach food and nutrition affects your overall health and well-being. Professional guidance can help with treatment and prevention of many chronic conditions as well as enhance overall wellness.

A double-blind, placebo controlled study with 408 asthmatic patients with low vitamin D status, found that supplementation with vitamin D was no better than a placebo in the treatment of asthma. There also were no negative effects from vitamin D supplementation.

Food products that indicate zero grams of trans fat per serving may still contain some trans fatty acids if the product contains partially hydrogenated oil. If a food has less than a half a gram of trans fat per serving, labeling regulations require that the product indicate zero grams on the label. Generally this is not a concern because a typical adult would need to consume more than five servings a day of these types of food to exceed the American Heart Association’s recommendation to consume less than one percent of dietary calories in the form of trans fats.

Early malnutrition is known to have many lasting and irreversible effects on growth and development. It appears that even the composition of the bacterial “microbiome” in the lower intestine fails to develop normally and may be adversely affected for many years, if not for life. The long-term health ramifications remain to be determined.

Adequate vitamin D status has been linked with a variety of aspects of positive health. However, there is a lack of good evidence that vitamin D is related to brain function and health in older people. The bottom line on vitamin D is probably like most everything else – get enough, but not too much and not too little.

Coffee is a complex mixture of natural compounds, only one of which is caffeine. New research indicates that some of these compounds appear to benefit the health of the retina in the eye. Consequently, reasonable consumption of coffee may help to prevent conditions like macular degeneration that commonly occur with aging.

May 12, 2014Ear infections are a common problem in young children. Before prescribing antibiotics, doctors generally recommend watchful waiting to see if the infection will clear on its own. Parents often want to use alternative therapies during this waiting period. However, since infections often clear up on their own, it is easy to give credit to an alternative therapy when it actually had nothing to do with resolution of the problem.